María Kodama was a strong and implacable administrator of the rights of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). But the widow and executor of the Argentine writer died without testifying on March 26, at the age of 86. Her lawyers were looking for heirs to the assets and rights to the work of the brilliant writer of which Kodama was the owner, since if they were not found they would go to the Government of the city of Buenos Aires.
In the absence of a will, Fernando Soto, Kodama’s lawyer, began the process of “succession by vacant inheritance” to verify the existence of possible Kodama heirs. And these presumed heirs and successors have appeared. Martín, Nicolás and María Belén Kodama, Kodama’s nephews and children of his late brother Jorge, accredited themselves as such this Tuesday and requested the declaration of heirs in his favor. Thus began a dispute over the future of the valuable Borges legacy.
Writer and translator, Kodama, was the wife, widow and universal heir of Jorge Luis Borges. She was the owner of movable and immovable property, on which the lawyer requested a provisional inventory days ago. The same thing that Kodama’s nephews have done by appearing in the cause.
Kodama also owned the copyright of all of Borges’ work, his manuscripts and originals, some drawings and his immense personal library, among other assets of great historical value, such as the infinity of medals, decorations and distinctions received by the writer. Argentinian.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1937, Kodama was the daughter of Japanese Yosaburo Kodama and Argentine María Antonia Schweizer, of Swiss-German, English and Spanish descent. She met Borges when she was 16 and he was 54, in a run-in at the exit of a bookstore in Buenos Aires. She told him that she was studying literature and he invited her to study Old English together. They would no longer be apart.
Although Borges married Elsa Astete in 1967, Kodama continued to see the writer whom he would marry in 1986, just a few months before the writer’s death in Geneva from liver cancer.
In 1988, Kodama created the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation in Buenos Aires, which houses an endless number of personal objects from the author of ‘El Alpeh’ at its headquarters. All of Borges’ literary work appears under the ownership of Kodama, in the National Registry of Intellectual Property of the National Directorate of Copyright (DNDA).
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